Tec 5 Neil B. McCage

    On March 20, 1941, in Oklahoma City, Neil was inducted into the U. S. Army and sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky.  At Ft. Knox, Neil was assigned to the 753rd Tank Battalion. Being that he had been a truck driver, it is believed that he was trained as a tank driver.

    In the late summer of 1941, the 753rd was sent to Camp Polk, Louisiana.  While there, they did not take part in the maneuvers that were taking place at the camp.  It appears that the reason the 753rd was sent to Camp Polk was that the decision had already been made to send the 192nd Tank Battalion overseas after the 192nd had taken part in the maneuvers. Since the army wanted replacements available for those men considered too old to go overseas, sending the 753rd to Louisiana provided them.  In October 1941, Neil volunteered to join the 192nd and was assigned to A Company which had been a Wisconsin National Guard Tank Company.

    Traveling west by train, the A Company arrived in San Francisco.  They next took a ferry to Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.  While on the island, they were inoculated and received physicals.

    Neil and the other tankers sailed for the Philippine Islands. After stops in Hawaii and Guam, they arrived in Manila on Thanksgiving Day, 1941.  They were taken to Ft. Stotsenburg by train and housed in tents along the road that ran between the fort and Clark Airfield.

    Neil spent the next two weeks working, with his company, to prepare the tanks for the expected maneuvers.  The morning of December 8, 1941, Captain Walter Write called A Company together.  He informed his men that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese hours earlier.  Write then ordered his tanks to the perimeter of the airfield.  There, they joined the other companies of the battalion to guard against Japanese paratroopers.

    All morning long, American planes filled the sky.  At noon the planes landed and their crews went to lunch.  Around 12:45 in the afternoon, as the tankers were eating lunch, they saw planes approaching Clark Airfield from the north.  At first, Neil and the others believed the planes were American.  It was only when bombs began exploding that the soldiers knew the planes were Japanese. The attack wiped out the American Army Air Corps.

    For the next four months, Neil and his battalion fought to slow the Japanese conquest of the Philippines.  In support of B Company, Neil took part in the first battle against the Japanese near Lingayen Gulf on December 21, 1941.

    During the Battle of Bataan, Neil fought a slow withdrawal down the Bataan Peninsula.  On one occasion, A Company had made its bivouac on both sides of a road.  During the night, as the tankers rested, they heard a noise as if someone was approaching. As they watched, a Japanese bicycle battalion came riding into their bivouac.

    The tankers grabbed their tommy-guns and waited in silence. When the Japanese got into the middle of the encampment, the tankers opened up with everything they had.  The flashes from the guns, the screaming, and general chaos made the night a scene of carnage.  When morning came, the members of A Company saw that they had completely wiped out the Japanese bicycle battalion.

    Neil also took part in the Battle of the Pockets.  The Japanese had landed Marines behind the main battle line.  Each unit of Japanese Marines was cut off from being reinforced.  The tankers rode through the Japanese positions with soldiers on the backs of their tanks. The soldiers dropped  hand-grenades into the Japanese foxholes.  While this was being done, to save ammunition, other tanks simply parked with one track over the Japanese foxholes.  Then, the tank driver spun the tank around on one track until the Japanese soldiers in the foxhole had been ground into pieces.

    On February 3, 1942, according to Abel Ortega, Neil's tank was hit by enemy fire.  Neil and the other members of his tank crew abandoned the tank.  As they made their way toward the other tanks in their platoon, one member of the tank crew, Pvt. Miles Weech, was shot in his stomach by a Japanese sniper.  Neil, seeing his friend shot, ran up to Abel and grabbed the tommy-gun that Abel was holding.  Neil ran up the road in the direction of the tree where he believed the sniper to be.  As he ran, he fired the gun into the tree.  Since there was no more sniper fire, it is believed that Neil had killed the sniper.  Neil's friend, Miles Weech, died from his wound on February 5th.

    On April 8, 1942, General Edward King made the decision to surrender the Filipino and American forces on Bataan.  The tankers received the order "crash" and destroyed their tanks.  To do this, A Company circled its tanks. Each tank fired an armor piecing shell into the engine of the tank in front of it.  The crews then opened the gasoline cocks and dropped hand grenades into the tanks setting them on fire.

    The next morning, April 9th, the tankers made their way to Mariveles at the southern tip of Bataan.  Before they got there, they stripped their uniforms of anything that indicated that they were tankers.  They did this because they knew that the Japanese were looking for them to take out revenge for what the tankers had done while fighting the Japanese.  It was from Mariveles that Neil started what became known as the death march.

    Neil made his way north from Mariveles to San Fernando.  He and the other Prisoners of War received little food and no water. According to other members of A Company, it seemed that the Japanese guards intentionally prevented them from drinking good water from the artesian wells that flowed across the road, but the guards were willing to let the prisoners drink the dirty water in the ditches which had the bodies of men killed on the march floating in them.

    At San Fernando, the POWs were herded into a bull-pin and and slept in the human waste of other POWs who had been held there the night before.  The next day the POWs were taken to the train station in San Fernando and boarded into small boxcars used to haul sugarcane.  They were packed in so tightly that the prisoners who died remained standing.

   At Capas, Neil and the other POWs disembarked the cars. As they did, the bodies of the dead fell to the ground.  The surviving POWs made their way to Camp O'Donnell.  Camp O'Donnell was an unfinished Filipino military camp.  There was only one water spigot for 12,000 POWs in the camp.  Men stood in line for days for a drink of water. Many died while waiting for a drink.  Disease ran wild in the camp causing as many as 50 men to die each day.

    It is not known if Neil went out on a work detail, but it is known that he was also held Cabanatuan prison camp when the new camp opened in May 1942.  During his time in the camp, Neil worked in the garden growing food for the Japanese.  Neil repeatedly stole food while working on this detail.  The POWs used the vegetables to supplement their diets.  Had Neil been caught doing this, he would have been severely beaten or executed.

    It is not known if Neil remained at Cabanatuan or was sent out to another camp to do work.  What is known is that Neil was still in the Philippine Islands in late 1944.

    In early October 1944, Neil and 1800 other POWs were marched to the Port Area of Manila.  On October 10th at Pier 7, they were boarded onto the Arisan Maru and forced into the ship's two holds.  The ship sailed, but instead of heading north to Formosa, it sailed south. For the next ten days the ship hid from American planes in a cove off the Island of Palawan. 

    For ten days, Neil and the other prisoners were held in the ship's holds while the Japanese formed a convoy.  On October 20th, the ship returned to Manila.  While it had been at sea, the Port Area of Manila had been bombed.  On October 21st, the convoy left Manila and entered the South China Sea.  The Japanese refused to mark POW ships with red crosses to indicate they were carrying POWs.  This made the ships targets for American submarines.  

    According to the survivors of the Arisan Maru on October 24, 1944, near dinner time, POWs were on deck preparing the meal for those in the ship's two holds.  The ship was near Shoonan, off the coast of China.  There was a sudden jar which was caused by the ship being hit by two torpedoes.  The ship stopped dead in the water.  It is believed that the submarine that fired the torpedoes was the U.S.S. Snook.

    As the Japanese abandoned ship, they cut the rope ladders into the ship's two holds.  Some of the POWs in the second hold were able to climb out and lowered a ladder to those in the first hold.  They also dropped ropes down to the POWs in both holds.  

    Many of the POWs attempted to escape the ship by clinging to rafts, hatch covers, flotsam and jetsam.  Those who could not swim raided the ship's galley and ate until their stomachs were full.  They wanted to die with full stomachs.  Most of the POWs survived the attack but died because the Japanese refused to rescue  them.  The Japanese destroyers in the convoy deliberately pulled away from the POWs as they attempted to reach them.  The sailors on the other ships pushed the POWs away with poles while the ships picked up the Japanese survivors.

    According to the survivors of the sinking, as the evening went on, fewer and fewer cries for help were heard.  Then, all there was was silence.

    T/5 Neil B. McCage lost his life when the Arisan Maru was torpedoed in the South China Sea on October 24, 1944.  Of the 1800 POWs on the ship, only nine survived the sinking.  Only eight of these POWs lived to see the end of the war.  

    Since he was lost at sea, T/5 Neil B. McCage's name appears on the Tablets of the Missing at the American Military Cemetery outside of Manila.

Return to Company A